Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.
So far we’ve encountered the lame (Kickboxer 4), the cheesy (Howling III) and the downright silly (Bolero), but none of the entries to date truly lives up to the moniker Unwatchable. I’m talking cinematic atrocities here, people – no holds barred, claw your own eyes out and pray for death bad. Horrors of Spider Island makes a pretty good run at achieving such status, but falters in the stretch run.
A 1960 German production shot in what was then Yugoslavia (perhaps you know it by the original title Toter hing im Netz, Ein – literally A Corpse Hangs in the Web), Spider Island has little use for the conventions of the horror movie. You know, like scary things happening. The opening music has such a jaunty, cocktail hour vibe you’d think one of the Thin Man movies is starting. The first ten minutes are taken up with a rather free-form audition process as a string of hopeful lasses are paraded through the office of a sleazeball putting together “a dancing troupe tour to Singapore.” Some of the girls are asked to dance, some just stand around, and one takes her clothes off without any prompting. (She’s hired on the spot.)
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